We asked several of the 2015 contributors for Post Arcade this year to submit their games of the year, which we will present over the course of the next week. A running theme through all of these lists is exactly how diverse our choices were. Today, Scott Lilwall.

Picking out the best games in a year is a fool’s errand. So much comes out in a year, that it’s impossible to play a fraction of it. So consider this as a simple list of great PC games this year, one that I hopefully inspires people to try out a title they hadn’t picked up. Or, at the least, makes some of you very, very angry.

Homeworld Remastered

One could say that it’s not quite fair to put a remastered game as one of the best of 2015. After all, Homeworld was already the best of 1999. Valid point, but I’m having trouble hearing it as I’m a 14-year-old boy again who is making very important laser sounds with my mouth.

Gearbox’s reincarnation of the series didn’t quite hit all the targets: the controls are still fiddly, the interface is one of yours worst enemies, and some of the strategic depths has been stripped out. But it’s clear the devs got what made Homeworld great — gloriously-hectic, epic space battles set against gorgeous, lonely galaxy.

Invisible Inc.

Hey, you know who was absolute crap at his job? James Bond. Despite being a spy — a word that literally means “to secretly collect information” — he spent most of his time blowing stuff up and banging anything with a double-X. Not to mention telling everyone in earshot his goddamn name.

There are no Bonds in Klei Entertainment’s Invisible, Inc. Instead, the turn-based game requires you to lead cyberpunk spooks with clockwork efficiency. Showoffs get shot and the best missions are those where the guards didn’t even know you were there. (At least, when it’s due to your skill and no the sometimes-wonky AI.)

Invisible suffers somewhat from a pretty uninspired story, but the design and art are dripping with personality. But the greatest appear is the way it makes you carefully consider every movement, and then mercilessly punishes you when you totally make the wrong one, idiot.

Her Story

Her Story shouldn’t really work. A story of murder, shock and betrayal chopped up into hundreds of video clips, played in no determined order. Somehow, it creates not only a coherent narrative, but a compelling one.

It’s sparse, stripped down and carried along by a great performance from actress Viva Seifert. While the whole thing takes place in a couple of interrogation rooms, but Her Story ranks among the greatest exploration games ever. Instead of new locations, however, you’re stumbling upon new snippets of the narrative and finding where they fit into the wider, patchy picture.

Prison Architect

As an apparently adult human being, I’m kind of a disorganized disaster. Remembering to pay the power bill on time or not eating the same meal six days in a row because of a lack of groceries count as minor victories in my life. So, it’s weird that I’m absolutely absorbed by management games.

The best of which aren’t about management, but about stories. The little narratives that emerge when you toss in a few mechanics and variables, then let the player loose.

Introversion’s Prison Architect is one of those games that breeds lovely little tales. Like that time I learned why prisons have fences on ALL four sides, or when my prisoners took it upon themselves to establish the festive holidays of Riot-o-ween and All Shanks Day.

The prison setting harks back to the glory days of the Bullfrog era, where the playful tone mixes combines with the life-and-death setting to create a darkly humourous game. Underneath the presentation, however, Prison Architect is a elegantly-designed management sim, an Early-Access success story that has obviously benefitted from the feedback it received.

Rebel Galaxy

This is pretty much the anti-Homeworld. A space adventure game where scale, physics and drama are tossed out the airlock in favour of a warmth and action. Firefly to Homeworld’s Battlestar.

Created by Double Damage, a small studio with a lot of pedigree, Rebel Galaxy doesn’t look as good as some of this year’s big budget releases. But, it values personality over polygons. Smart design choices — such as ignoring the third dimension altogether and making battles into naval engagements built around broadsides — turn limitations into strengths. For those who couldn’t decide if they wanted to be a cowboy, an astronaut or a pirate when they grew up; why not all three?

Rocket League

Rocket League is a silly game. You drive around in silly cars and play soccer with a silly oversized ball. You boost around in silly ways, ignoring anything resembling conventional physics. It seems like a silly game you might invent in your silly friend’s backyard during junior high. It’s flashy, it’s over the top and it’s addictive. Simple, easy to pick up, damn hard to master, it’s a game where you’re just as likely to win due to your opponent’s incompetence as your own skill.

It’s a silly amount of fun. You should play it.

Cities: Skylines

It has a pretty dark stretch for city-building fans before Colossal Order released Cities: Skylines in March. The game, which promised a return to the classic SimCity feel, largely lived up to the hype. Realizing that the kind of people who get excited over the idea of enacting virtual recycling bylaws might not appreciate being forced into social interactions, Cities delivered what us municipal nerds were asking for: the singleplayer, offline experience of building a city and immediately starting to hate the demanding jerks who moved in.

A good title made great by understanding how important the modding community is to keeping a game fresh. Just wish they could have come up with a better game.

Metal Gear Solid V

Finally, someone in the games industry has read all those letters I’ve been sending about needing a healthy way to vent my desire for balloon-based kidnapping.

A half-baked story has angered up the blood of a lot of hardcore Snake lovers. But, while I’ve been a fan of the series for a long time, the soap opera silliness of the MGS series has never been the highpoint for me. For me, it’s always been about the stories that the games created, usually after a massive cock-up on my part. MSG V gave me the tools and an intricately-detailed sandbox to act like a real idiot. The geopolitical destabilization is just gravy.

Sunless Sea

I think we can all agree that video games are the ideal medium for displaying long, dense blocks of text. It’s not perfect, but until science can come up with some sort of pulp-based way of displaying words, it’s the best we’ve got.

Sunless Sea is more reading than playing. But it is able to pull it off, mostly due to the solid writing, well-crafted atmosphere and pitch-black humour. I don’t know how big the market is for a Lovecraftian-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure/trading simulator/naval battle game. But if that description filled you with giddy excitement and/or a creeping, unnameable dread, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Kerbal Space Program

Due to our country’s short-sighted “legal system” and the universe’s inane “laws of physics”, KSP is the closest I will ever get to running my own space program. Calculating fuel/weight ratios and figuring out-thrust equations might not seem like a ripping good time, but KSP has a way of sucking you in. It hits that sweet spot of complexity that makes every new task seem like a challenge, while never making it seem impossible to move on to the next step. A lot of modern games struggle to inspire a sense of spectacle and awe in their players once or twice — Kerbal seems to pull one off every time I get my dumpster fire of a rocketship into orbit.

Because a game just isn’t fun unless you have to break out a slide rule every so often.

Almost Done!

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